Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters By 1912... ?

It came out a couple years before 1912. Charles Newton invented it and sold Savage on the idea. He was also playing with other .22's before then. A.O.Niedner had by then necked down the .32-40 case to .22 for Dr. Mann and his experiments that were included in Mann's book "The Bullet's Flight" in 1909, and was killing groundhogs throughout New England with it prior to 1912 and not getting much sleep for having to build them for his friends. Ballistics not unlike the .223.

Other pre-1913 cartridges still widely available, because they've proved very useful, include the .22 Long Rifle, 6.5x55 "Swedish Mauser" (actually a joint Norway-Sweden design for the Norwegian Krag rifle), 8x57 Mauser, .35 Remington, 9.3x62 Mauser, .416 Rigby, and .45-70 Springfield.

He had me at "Mauser 98".

All I can say is I'm glad it's not 1912 anymore. The choices were few and dreary.

Oh, I don't know. Fewer people. Fewer weirdos. There were just as many good cartridges then as now. The rifle actions and barrels were as good as now.

Women cooked. Only men had the vote. With the possible exception of health care, life was better and much simpler then.

Much less game in North America. If you wanted to go to overseas you had to float in some iceberg bound POS like the Titantic....................

In 1912, my grandfather was 10 years old. He walked to an unheated school and milked by hand. Ten years later, he was hunting quail on horseback with a 16 ga. SxS, in a place where you could ride over three counties without seeing a "posted" sign. You could ride over three counties without seeing a deer, too, but SW Missouri was a bird hunter's paradise.

In five more years, he had a Model T (and could have had a .270, but still no deer so he didn't bother). I vote for 1927.

Back to the original question: What can we do now that we couldn't do then?

Drive to hunt on paved roads in air-conditioned pickups.

Pack out game on ATVs.

Watch hunting on TV.

Tell hunting stories and other lies on the Internet.

Wear long johns that aren't itchy because they aren't wool.

Hmmm....this thread makes me wonder. If I were to vote for the best time, I would pick the 1950s. "Modern" guns were essentially here (after all, you could have a Weatherby or a Superposed), game was plentiful due to conservation efforts (funded to a great degree by hunters), and more hunting was within the average person's reach. That was the time when one could find a good place to hunt on private land more easily than today.

Might as well be shooting black powder, no real innovation until the 222 Magnum...

I don't know of any left hand rifles in 1912.

Due to the fact that we have better projectiles and ammo those cartridges are better now than they were then.


Mike

Not much as far as firearms go. Although LW bolt actions were not all that common.

Used to be a serious "Bird" hunter with Dogs usually had a station wagon instead of a truck.

The clothing choices back then left a lot to be desired. Comfortable boots especially. Never could see the advantage of pants that hugged the calves and non-waterproof boots that laced up to the knees.

Grouse and Ducks were in numbers that would astound us today.

As a general comment, I always love it when people talk about older, simpler times, especially when they didn't live then. In 1912 the average pay for American workers was the equivalent of $5000 to $10,000 a year today, and the average age of death was around 50 years for men (women, as now, lived a little longer), mostly because of infant deaths and adult diseases.

Effective innoculations against pneumonia and flu were decades in the future, the reason both were major reasons for early death. In 1918 the "Spanish" flu killed an estimated 50 to 100 million people in the world. That was at the tail end of World War I, which started in 1914 and lasted four years, killing an estimated 16 million people died and wounding 20 million others.

There were very few big game animals in most of North America, and unless you were one of the relatively few people who made a lot more than the average worker, you couldn't afford to travel where good numbers existed. Elk were at their lowest population level ever. And it got worse during the Depression. Today there's a huntable deer population within a day's drive of almost everyone in North America, or if there aren't many deer there's some other sort of big game. Yeah, Southern quail hunting was a lot better in 1912 than it is now, due to so many small farms, but on most of the continent hunting is better now than it was 100 years ago.

My grandparents all remembered those days when I knew them in the 1950's and 60's, and all much preferred their modern life to what they went through earlier in the 20th century. Think I'll stick with 2014.

Not all good "things" were made before 1912. The Nosler Partition was 1948.

Seeing a Deer track in Pa during the early 1900s was an event according to recorded history.

Although the Indians of the 1800s had them, including Elk. And Buffalo in the 1700's.

My dad was born in 1921, and spent his entire life on a farm/ranch in eastern MT. He told me that he was in his late teens or early 20s when he saw his FIRST deer. He was riding up a draw in some rough country when he heard something, looked over, and saw a deer that he had startled. His horse was a bit startled too, as the story goes. So when the rules change and we can't shoot antlerless (read tasty) mule deer cause the numbers are down, I don't complain. I know that it is indeed possible to have great deer habitat, but no deer.

Mule Deer, you are very right about the advantages of modern times, but I think that there is a concern that modern times may change hunting opportunities, and not always for the better. When I was a kid, there were about three times as many farms in my part of the country as there are today. Same acres, but fewer, and larger, operations. And that means fewer people know someone who is happy to let them hunt. A lot more acres are leased for hunting, and unavailable to those who don't hire the outfitter who leases those rights. But on the other hand is CRP (still quite a lot of it, though not as much as a decade ago) and block management, both of which have opened up acreage to hunters. It's still good....but will it stay that way?

No bigger curmudgeon than me,and I would gladly hunt about anything with a 7x57 or 30/06,and a 375H&H.

But today we have cartridges giving more velocity (and everything good and bad that goes with that);bullets that shoot more accurately,have better ballistics and are better terminally,far better scopes,LRF's,and rifles that are generally more accurate.

If a person practices they can hit further and be more deadly, even with the 30/06 and 7x57.

What we use them on is a different question. There may be more hunting available than ever before in NA but if starting now, I know I could never duplicate what I have done today....many of the hunts I did routinely and inexpensively are 5 figures today,and some hunts I have done cost as much as a new SUV now.

Logistically I could not live long enough to draw the tags. You have to sit and wait for permits (years?)for hunts I did with over the counter tags annually.

I'll hunt Wyoming this year unguided,on mixed public and private land;but at least half of the country I have hunted since the 70's is now in corporate ownership and off limits. I have seen this happen quite a bit as the years have rolled past.No more access.

Glad I did it all when I could.

+1 to what you said Bob. But on the other hand I remember hunting in Colorado in the 70's and early 80's. There were so many hunters when they were selling tags to everyone from anywhere.

You could set on the side of a hill and watch swarms of little blaze orange dots moving around in the distance. I remember being on a trail in unit 40 as an October snow was melting, there were stuck two wheel drive pick-ups jamming it to the point it looked like a convoy going around the hill and out of sight, miserable.

Point being, the drawing for tags and managing for trophy racks has improved everything in the field, including chances at a trophy. Maybe the good ole days are now.
Happy hunting